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All Rise...

Appellate Judge Mac McEntire installed a dimmer switch on his oracle.

The Charge

Which reality do you live in?

Opening Statement

The 2004 Canadian TV series Dark Oracle combined high school
misadventures with supernatural freakiness. This one, though, doesn't feature a
teen girl who karate kicks vampires. Instead, it has the gimmick of animated
comic book panels interacting with the live action characters.

The show ran for two seasons, and all 26 episodes are now on this three-disc
set. Is it fun and exciting, like a trip to your neighborhood comic book store,
or is it gloomy and disturbing…like a trip to your neighborhood comic book
store?

Facts of the Case

One day after shopping for comic books, fraternal 15-year-old twins Cally
(Paula Brancati, Degrassi: The Next
Generation) and Lance (Alex House, Jane and the Dragon) discover
they've brought home a comic they didn't buy. The comic, called "Dark
Oracle," features twins Violet and Blaze, who share numerous similarities
with Cally and Lance. The stories in the comic somehow are able to predict what
will happen to Cally and Lance in the near future.

Armed with future knowledge from the comic, our heroes must deal with
ordinary teen crises, such as romance, bullies, and grades. In addition, they
keep encountering the supernatural, as another, more sinister, reality bleeds
into their own, like ink and color bleeding into the spaces between panels of a
comic book.

The Evidence

I didn't know what to expect from Dark Oracle, with its promise of
mixing animation with live action. I feared it would be nothing but a gimmick
show. Instead, I was happy to see that the show sticks to the story at hand,
with the animation serving to move the plot forward. The show's writers have
created a fascinating fantasy world to play with, and it's great to see it
develop over two seasons.

The basic setup is that at the start of every episode, a new issue of the
comic book mysteriously appears out of nowhere, giving our heroes a glimpse of
their own future. As Lance and Cally act on their own futures, usually to
prevent trouble from happening, the story in the comic changes to reflect what
they've done. It's kind of like Early
Edition, but with a comic book instead of a newspaper—and with more
black-cloaked evil necromancers.

During the first season, it's mostly stand-alone stories. An episode guide
would look like this: The big dance almost ends in disaster! The school fashion
show almost ends in disaster! A paintball game almost ends in disaster! And so
on. But with every episode, the world inside the comic book comes closer and
closer to merging with the real world. This keeps things interesting, as each
episode ends with the promise of complicating things even more for Cally and
Lance in the next episode. This makes the show compulsively watchable—once
one episode ends, you want to start the other one right away.

Just what sort of fantasy adventure are we dealing with here? There's the
"real world" and the "comic book world," and the characters
from the comic world badly want into the real world. Over time, the show's
writers come up with interesting ways for the two worlds to interact, and set
things up so that the contact becomes less ambiguous and more direct as the
series progresses. It starts as just a vague sense of a connection between the
two, but then it's gradually revealed that the characters in the comic are aware
of the real world. This sets up a ticking clock, in which the two world get
closer and closer with every episode. Skipping over the question of how any of
this is possible, the big mystery is, what do Violet and Blaze want? It's not
until late in the season that we discover they're not nice people, and Cally and
Lance worry about the trouble to be caused if their doppelgangers ever escape
from the printed page. Violet and Blaze are sympathetic villains, though. The
glimpses of their world that we get through the comic show it to be always
night, with gangs of scary mutants standing in for school bullies, etc. In one
of their rare dialogue exchanges, Violet states that it's not enough to see the
world, she wants to "feel" it, which says a lot about the struggles
these otherwise villainous characters are experiencing.

During the first season, in every episode, there's a moment in which
everything "goes blue" for lack of a better word. This is when, as the
story reaches its climax, the lighting switches to an all blue scheme, going
from normal colors to looking like something out of that movie Underworld. While everything is blue,
all the characters except for Cally and Lance act differently, either
exaggerated or with a more sinister tone. When reality switches from blue back
to normal, there's a brief moment of confusion, and then everyone except our
heroes don't realize something strange has just happened. What's interesting is
that this phenomenon is never questioned or even discussed by the main
characters. You and I both know that it's caused by the influence of the comic
book world exerting itself onto the real world, but the show's writers never
take the time to sit viewers down and actually say that. Is that I good thing,
in that it assumes the audience isn't made up of idiots, or is it a bad thing,
in that Lance or Cally never stop and say, "What just happened?"
Either way, the blue effect doesn't appear at all in the second season, and
that's too bad. I looked forward to these blue scenes. They have a real
"David Banner's eyes turn green" feel, in that when it happens, you
know the really cool stuff is about to go down.

There are powers at play in Dark Oracle. Lance and Cally's connection
with the comic brings them in contact with some odd characters who dabble in
magic and the supernatural. This is where the above-mentioned black-cloaked evil
necromancers come in. Their devilish dabblings provide our heroes with
information they need to deal with the cursed comic, as well as serving as live
action villains for them to square off against. I must admit, though, that the
necromancer plots are the show at its cheesiest, but this is a cheesy fantasy
show at heart, though, and they are integral to the story, cheesy or no. The
best bad guy of the bunch is the character played by Kristopher Turner
(Instant Star), whose identity I'm not going to spoil. Like Vern, you're
never sure just who's side he's on, but in his case it's done right, and the
story builds suspense whenever he's around.

Lance's love of all things geeky is what kicks off the action in the pilot.
It's his regular visits to the comic book store that first puts the magic comic
in his possession. Lance is a "gamer," which in this series
encompasses everything from MMORPGs to tabletop games to paintball. Lance's
interests are what lead him to unlock the comic's secrets, and he's the one to
jump into action whenever there's a possibility to learn more about the unseen
magic happening around him. Despite the character's flirtations with the dark
side, actor Alex House sells his earnestness and his desire to do the right
thing, making for a nice hero for audiences to get behind. Lance has a nice,
easygoing chemistry with his sister, too, which makes the wilder aspects of the
show easier to swallow. I especially like the "Don't hit!" running gag
they share.

Cally, as the less-geeky half of the duo, is more concerned with school,
friends, and, of course, boys than she is with comic books. When there's
trouble, though, she turns to the comic for some future predictions, and runs
off to rescue her brother just as often as he runs off to rescue her. If Lance
is the "action hero" of the pair, then Cally is clearly the
"heart" of their team. She wants to be free of the burden of the
comic, but she also cares enough about the people she encounters in her crazy
adventures to want to help them. In addition to worrying about the magic and
fantasy, Cally also pursues romance from a couple of hunky guys, struggles to
maintain her loyalty to her best friend, and deals with numerous projects and
activities at school. There are times when actress Paula Brancati went a little
overboard on the "know-it-all teen girl on a rampage" shtick, but
mostly she comes across as a nice "everygirl" for viewers to relate
to.

As for the supporting cast, Danielle Miller (Corner Gas) stars as
Sage, the offbeat girl who works behind the counter at the comic book store. She
and Lance develop a romance as time goes on. Miller gives a quirky performance,
and yet she does so naturally, as in it wouldn't surprise me if she really is
this outside-the-norm girl in reality than she is on the show. An episode late
in season two had Miller playing two characters, and her turnaround really
surprised me. Our comic relief is provided by Dizzy, played by Jonathan Malen
(The Rocker). He's your basic
"goofball best friend" that always pops up in shows like this. There's
some attempt in season two to depict him as a more well-rounded character, but
for the most part he's here to make his customary few slapstick jokes per
episode, and that's it.

It's with the other live action villains that things get a little sketchy.
In the first season, we meet Doyle (Mark Ellis, Flashpoint), the comic shop owner, who
keeps all kinds of mysterious secrets locked away in the store's back room. In
the first season, he's genuinely menacing, as he desperately tries to keep
Cally, Lance and the others from learning what he's up to. In the second season,
his arc takes an interesting turn, where he tries to reform his dark magic ways
and turn his life around, ultimately becoming a good guy. The show's other
ongoing villain is Vern (David Rendall, Radio Free Roscoe), a goth
classmate of the twins. Vern struck me as inconsistent. At times, he's the
stereotypical bully, pushing Lance around, while at other times, they seem to
have this slight respect for one another. In the second season, Vern decides to
take Doyle's place as necromancer numero uno, and it doesn't go well for him.
The problem is that it's hard to take Vern seriously as a threat when his
pitiful attempts at being evil are his own undoing. Also, what sort of dark
necromancer is named Vern?

All 26 episodes of the show's run are on this three-disc set. The picture
quality is slightly soft and the black levels aren't as deep or rich as they
could be, but in general there are no major flaws in the video. Same goes for
the stereo sound. It's not a booming, immersive track, but all the dialogue and
music is clean and clear. For extra features, we get bonus episodes of Mona the Vampire and Treasure, two
flaky-but-inoffensive kids' shows, and a bonus feature film, Sally Marshall
is Not an Alien. Made in 1998, the movie is about two kids who make a bet to
determine if the strange family in their neighborhood is, in fact, not a bunch
of aliens. Didn't anyone teach these kids that it's a lot harder to prove the
negative? Like the bonus cartoons, the movie is light and inoffensive, though
its slow pace might be a deal-killer for kids, not to mention their parents.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

I've heard that some folks are uncomfortable with the fact that the otherwise
carefree teens in Dark Oracle do things like mess with tarot cards,
attempt to cast spells, conduct weird rituals in graveyards, etc. This is a
fantasy series, and scenes like this, cheesy though they may be, are integral to
the fantasy plot. If the subject matter still bothers you, perhaps you should
look elsewhere.

For the rest of the parents and/or conservative types out there, the show is
quite chaste when it comes to sexiness and violence, and I didn't catch any
references to alcohol or drugs.

Closing Statement

Dark Oracle isn't the best TV show you'll ever see, but it nonetheless
knows how to entertain. For as much as it occasionally wallows in TV teen
cheese, it also creates a cool alternate world that really draws viewers in. If
you like your fantasy tales on the lighter side, check it out.